


end[ur]ing

by MaryPSue



Series: Almost Original [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: 'mary is this about a vampire' yes. yes it is., Apocalypse, Gen, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:07:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24665863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: She does not believe in cataclysm, not really. Not anymore....An immortal, and the ends of the world, and world without end.
Series: Almost Original [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1680838
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	end[ur]ing

**Author's Note:**

> Well, nobody's told me to take down the untitled swan princess story yet, so I figured I might as well crosspost some other origfic. 
> 
> Recommended listening: Florence + the Machine's 'South London Forever'.

_the world belongs to us._

…

She wears names lightly, now. Once she chose them for cleverness, little puzzles in foreign tongues, little veils to hide her true face. Once she chose them for beauty, for the way they trilled or hissed or lilted. Once she chose them for meaning, little talismans, little charms for grace, serenity, patience, wisdom. 

Now she chooses them quickly, and sheds them every mile.

…

What once were seen as flaws, quickly become signatures. The hiss of a record on an old Victrola; the grain of film or the silvery shadows of a tintype; the wear of painted wood. The patina of age-darkened glaze obscuring a portrait’s enigmatic smile.

She lives in apartments in houses where once she attended parties clad in taffeta and lace, voile and crêpe. (No - never crêpe - the longer the memory, the more it blurs. Crêpe was for mourning, never for parties. She can still feel the ghostly scratch of it against her skin.) Air conditioners hum on the other side of wafer-thin walls, walls stripped of their arsenic paper and wired for electricity. The murmuring buzz is distinct from and yet somehow kin to the long-gone gaslights’ hiss, a white noise like the passing flood of history made sound. The tall, narrow windows of warped glass admit little cool air, had there been any to admit. The world is burning. She will watch it burn itself alive. She always has.

The world is lightning in a bottle and the slowness of wheat waving in a lazy summer breeze. She trips down cobbled streets in sandals she might have worn when those cobbles were new, following the paths of so many countless feet before her. The streetlights blur in a haze of whatever she’s drunk on, alcohol or melancholy or love, turning to tiny yellow suns. She dances through a night lit by artificial stars, a night close and warm like a secret shared, like a transgression forgiven. The night has not been truly dark for a long, long time.

…

There are stories. About girls like her, about how cold eternity must be. But eternity comes, like life, like stories, in little slices. A rooftop here, an attic there. Sweat on the back and bass in the lungs. A thousand twinkling lights, exploding in the distant sky. The sun, sinking over the desert and painting it in colours from some psychedelic dream. A cold night in a car. Rain on a bathroom window. Eternity comes in moments, like images in a song, each one a feeling. Each one unique. Each one irreplaceable.

Eternity falls in drops, like the patter of rain on the rooftop at dusk, and she lets it lull her into dreaming.

…

There are wind chimes on the porch and a line of scavenged feathers and quartz on the fraying painted windowsill above the sink. There is a garden down the hill waving with corn taller than she is and sunflowers taller than the corn, tall enough to catch clouds down out of the eggshell sky. Smoke lies like a smothering film over everything. The tic-tac-toe squares of light that fall across the faded carpet are red and dull.

She will be leaving, soon. In a month this place may be ash. The woods that ring it surely will. Cathedrals of redwoods, silent holy spaces that have not much changed through long centuries, plundered at last like the coastal monasteries of old, their laboriously-crafted artwork destroyed for the sake of its gilding. She has long retreated here, to this place with a heart of silence and a true-dark sky, this place it seems that time does not touch. The loss of it, visible on the horizon as an angry reddish glare thrown on the smokescreen of the sky, stings like vinegar in a wound. Sits on her tongue with the choking, bitter taste of the smoke.

She will not miss the house, dear as it has been. Or, perhaps, ‘miss’ is not the word. She will remember fondly the time she spent here, think wistfully of the smell of resin and dust and vanillin, wish she could spend another day reading on the threadbare cushions of the window seat. But she will not mourn these things. 

There is something to cherish about the ephemerality of beauty, of quiet joy, of all things which inevitably must end. There is beauty in finality, too, in the vividness of each brief moment, in the purity of it before it vanishes into the next, to live on only in long and hazy memory. There is beauty and bittersweetness in a world that never ceases, in a world that, itself never ceasing, forces all things within it to cease in its stead. Even the word 'enduring’ contains the word 'ending’ within itself.

And yet, always, the things she loses are returned to her. Nothing dies, nothing is destroyed, only transformed. All things return, always a surprise. Time makes all things strange and new.

No, she will not feel the loss of the house. She will feel the loss of the woods. But they, too, like all things that end, will regrow. _Everything that dies someday comes back_ , Springsteen croons from the battered radio. The wind chimes jangle counterpoint. The melody, recorded and replayed, captive, unchanging, is nevertheless made new.

…

Once, long ago, Armageddon was a place.

…

They talk about _the end of the world_ like it is a thing, delineated. Clear and simple, bounded with the stark black lines of a cartoon. Before, a world. And then, no world at all.

But there is always world. There is always sky, somewhere. There are always familiar parts of childhood vanishing. Once, there was an eternal Roman empire. Once, there was a divine right of kings. Worlds that return, with new and surprising forms. Worlds that ended lifetimes ago.

There is still world. There is still laughter on clear days and bright, defiant dandelion blooms and little toys in the likeness of animals with wheels that children can tow along behind them. There is still invention and obsolescence, there is still fear and hope. The world ends every night and makes itself anew every morning. The world ends in little ways every day until a decade has passed and one finds the world unrecognisable.

She does not believe in cataclysm, not really. Not anymore.

…

There is nothing to believe in, and everything, in this world without end, in this world that only ever ends. Some of the things she has believed in over the long, long span of her life have included absinthe and angels; music and melancholy; forget-me-nots. Candles in windows and waves on shores. Locks of hair. Sea-glass. Oil, and salt, and wine. The past. The future. Daybreak. Dusk.

One day, even these things will pass out of living memory. One day - perhaps sooner than she thinks - there will be nothing left of the crisp, cold, dying brightness of autumn and the sharp sweet taste of glacial air. 

But there is dancing, now, and there will be dancing for as long as there are feet, as long as there is music. Perhaps that’s worth dancing for.


End file.
